If you’re still using sp_who, sp_who2, and Activity Monitor, listen up: there’s a great free replacement, and it’s now open source, too!
sp_WhoIsActive is a much more powerful way to analyze what’s happening right now on your server. Here’s what you need to know:
- sp_WhoIsActive’s home on Github – releases page – issues
- It’s licensed with the GPLv3, meaning it’s free as in speech
- Excellent documentation on the different parameters
- High fives all around to Adam Machanic (Blog – @AdamMachanic) for his legendary work in building it, and his generosity in open sourcing it
With this, we’ll be deprecating sp_BlitzWho. The only reason we initially wrote it was that we needed something purely open source that we could distribute without any copyright concerns. Now, with Adam licensing sp_WhoIsActive under the GPL license, there’s absolutely no reason that any of you shouldn’t be using sp_WhoIsActive as part of your database troubleshooting routine. You should high-five Adam the first chance you get. Or buy him liquor. Or both.
21 Comments. Leave new
Adam – thank you for one of the best and most-used tools in my arsenal! And thanks to you, Brent, for recognizing the importance of this going open source and using real estate on your website!
The number One utility in my Utility belt… (no offense to the Brent’s utilities). High five to Adam and drinks on me as soon as opportunity to do that comes up.
This is great news! Thank you so much, Adam!
I use both sp_BlitzWho and sp_WhoIsActive. Please keep sp_BlitzWho.
High five to Brent and Adam.
Does anyone have an easy method to centrally deploy tools like these to several SQL servers in some sort of automated process?
You can use a Central Management Server to run a script on multiple servers at the same time.
PowerShell and DBAtools:
https://docs.dbatools.io/#Install-DbaWhoIsActive
There is also a command for Ola’s scripts:
https://docs.dbatools.io/#Install-DbaMaintenanceSolution
OH! I love this! I use dbatools a lot and didn’t know this was in it. I like the file option as well – I wonder if it could be used for other sql scripts as well – would be pretty handy to set up a scheduled task somewhere that connects to all your SQL servers and then runs the command against all .sql files in a file share.
I haven’t done that exact thing, but this looks like what you’re looking for:
https://github.com/Staggerlee011/PowerShell/blob/master/SQLServer/Invoke-SQLScripts.ps1
Yeah, I had played with that a bit, but I believe the ‘GO’ batches in some of the scripts were stopping the job in the where ever the batch stopped. I made something using dynamic SQL that avoided that, but it was complicated enough that I could never remember how to run it without playing with it for a bit and eventually gave up on it.
Thank you both very much for your contributions to helping DBA’s as myself
Big shout out and thank you! I would love to add [context_info] from [dm_exec_sessions]. Perhaps someone will add, I wish i had time to play… Love you guys!
Thank you both for helping DBAs!
Many Thanks, you both
And now it runs On SQL Azure – WOW!!!
Thanks this is great news. Always the first tool I recommend and much easier than activity monitor – is there any difference between this and sp_BlitzWho? I have only ever tried the former.
Robin – yep! You can run both of ’em or read the documentation to go through the differences.
[…] sp_WhoIsActive Is Now Open Source In fact, it happened a few months ago. Thanks to Adam Machanic for open-sourcing the code. […]
Is Adam fine and alright? There’s no activity of him on Twitter and dataeducation.com/blog since mid 2018, SQLBits and other conferences, sqlblog.com is down…
Glad to suddenly see some info about him here in 2019 and his famous utility.
Yeah, he’s fine. He’s not working that much with SQL Server anymore though. He presented at SQL Saturday Boston a couple of months ago and I had the chance to talk with him – he’s great as usual.
Thank you for info about him, Brent.
I think that SQL Server community lost a strong expert of “manhandling parallelism”, SQL CRL programming and more other stuff. I hope he’ll return to SQL Server some day. Who’s gonna talk about hidden gems in SQL Server 2019 now 🙂 ?
Thanks Adam. sp_whoisactive is a tool everyone should have. Looking forward for more improvements as the tool is now open to the community.